195 Comments

Your question reminds me: I think one of the best services Steve has done for Science is to enforce his policy of snipping whenever OT or OTT or unnecessarily speculative or discourteous. This has built up within the skeptics’ community a great strength IMO. Of course, venting is very natural, and obviously, in the present situation, pretty unavoidable too. However, the enforced discipline of always staying right on topic has built into myself at least, a proof of the workability of Science By Blog, and it’s a discipline I don’t intend to forget in a hurry.

On the topic of defenses, personality ones, the late emails show much high dudgeon and heightened shock. They are implicitly, and tremendously, fearful their house of cards will fall. They cheer each other up with pretensions to the highest of scientific ethics, everyone else lack them.

One, who I will not name, several times reacts in a textual version of Bogart’s strawberries meltdown in The Caine Mutiny.

Today’s WSJ has a brilliant lead editorial about the scandal, hiding data
deleting email, etc. This isn’t going away this time. Mann and Jones appear
to be hiding out in a cave, Mann not using his previous, all-purpose “won’t dignify that question…..”

The Wall Street Journal writes:

“The ‘two MM’s’ are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions – a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service.”

Thank you, M&M! I am so ashamed at what I suspect is the spread of the corruption, or intimidation by science thugs.

Yes, that’s almost certainly it. The liberated correspondence confirms that he attempted to delete emails, and asked others to delete theirs as well. No doubt he also subsequently attempted to delete the particular emails boasting of and requesting deletions. He has now found to his dismay that all of the deletions failed, and is using the failure as a defense. Reminds me of the story about the boy who killed his parents begging for clemency since he was an orphan.

No, the trick was to hide the decline in the number of e-mails. It can be shown that the decline in the number of e-mails is a proxy for increasing surface temperature of the Earth (multiply by 1.15 for sea surface temps).

When I put the allegation to Professor Jones that the hacked e-mails suggested he had supported deleting e-mails in breach of FOI, he said: “We haven’t deleted any emails. I delete my own personal emails a year at a time regardless of subject as I have too many, but the university still has the emails.”

I assume this is part of a line by now agreed on the whole sorry mess (as seen from CRU’s point of view). Whatever. They didn’t exactly rush to get the data out to Steve to help him help them in a joint search for truth, I think we can all agree. Meanwhile, doing a decent job of analyzing the copious source code in FOIA.zip is I assume a non-trivial task.

The intent is showing in his 2008 quote. At that time, he was either not aware that IT had the back-ups, or did not want to admit it to his correspondent. Either option looks “naughty.”
Hasn’t he talked to a lawyer yet? Wouldn’t one have told him, “Phil, shut the **** up!”

Steve, could it be that Jones was naive enough in to think that by deleting the emails in his personal folder in Dec 2008 that they deleted from the system, and now his IT guys are telling him that there are backup files.

May I ask a stupid question? If the tree rings “diverge” over the past 50 years, why assume they converge before before they diverge? Doesn’t it make more sense to assume that if the rings don’t converge in the last 50 years, they’ve never converged at any point?

What struck me earlier was how happy the two Russia Today presenters were to discuss Climategate in terms of ‘conspiracy’, quite unlike here in the UK where predictably it’s been brought out this week by Phil Jones and George Monbiot – the latter having just asked for the resignation of the former – almost as a Pavlovian trigger of ridicule and abuse. But, given the history of Russia, I guess the difference is not so surprising.

“Conspiracy” has a stigma attached to it in the US/Britain. It’s entirely irrational ofcourse – conspiracies are a fact of life and they are treated as such by the law, but talking about them in public opens the floodgates to ridicule.

It’s exactly that kind of stigma that helps conspiracies flourish, since they never see the light of day.

“Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for Nasa and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.”

He deceptively says the other bodies are independent. While technically true, it’s clear from the emails that they were all working together in common purpose.

As the lawyers say, the best questions are the ones to which you already know the answer, so likely the best way to start would be to make a detailed FOI request to UEA CRU for all the emails and other documents which have already been leaked in FOIA.zip , excluding only those emails which are purely personal scuttlebutt, like the notorious 1075403821. If all those FOIA.zip documents come out via “formal FOI” 😉 and are found to match the FOIA.zip versions, then the question of FOIA.zip’s accuracy is settled, and attempts to avoid the issues raised by FOIA.zip by pointing to the possibly illegal nature of the leak are also undermined. If something different happens, then that will also be very informative. Maybe the Daily Telegraph or WSJ or some other institution is already at work on such a request.

Is it not foolish to expect those FOI requests to be honoured when we know they’ve been circumventing the law to avoid honouring FOI requests for years?

There needs to be an independent investigation. The hard drives need to be siezed and analysed. There’s no point in asking the accused whether they’re guilty or not – these people don’t have the moral fibre to be doing the right thing and admitting their mistakes.

Actually, this comment could be true. You can delete thousands of emails out of your account, and not even touch the server copy let alone the back-ups.

Phil Jones probably went to the IT department and asked them if they deleted any emails off the servers. If they said no, then he can actually be accurate in both quotes. Most likely, he is kicking himself becuase like most people he thought delete means delete in the email world.

He may have deleted emails, he says that he deletes emails over a certain age, but he may now may be relying on the fact that they are not deleted in that UEA/CRU keep all emails, to make his statement true.

For all we know he may have thought, at the time that he requested that others also delete theirs, that simply hitting the delete button got rid of them.

When will these guys ever learn to pick up the phone, or use their private e-mail accounts when they are doing stuff that is not fit for public consumption.

The UEA’s FOI guidance to staff specifically states that all e-mails are potentially subject to release under FOI legislation. Staff are adviced to act acordingly.

Look stuff, goes on, in many organisations people have to be sounded out over things “off the record”, and in my experience, not using office facilities by din’t of being off premises. “Let’s talk a walk in the park”, “I’ll phone you tonight”.

What continues to shock me is the casualness of all this and the concept that people are inherently reliable (onside). With one shocking exception, I have always kept to the principle that anything that I write may be broadcast deliberately or unintentially to the whole bloody universe. To remind me of this I write comments under my own name.

I certainly do not write what I truly think about this affair on blogs as it would be libelous in the extreme. Call me old fashioned!

Ultimately nothing is private unless you take precautions to make it so. In a previous incarnation I was a recording engineer and from time to time tapes of interviews etc. that had been pulled would circulate so we could have a good laugh. These days they would all be up on u-tube in seconds. Or would they? I can remember one where a PM of GB, behaved in ways that could have ended his career on the spot. It takes balls to release something like that and in those days you couldn’t just upload stuff anonymously into the public domain.

For the record the PM was Harold Wilson, yes I am that old! I thought about it and since he is dead I am pretty safe.

I simply dispair of these people or perhaps I despair of simple people.

Please note I know you dont like people delegating but unfortunately I am not sure how to do this. Below I have extracted a post made on the Daily Telegraph web site I have picked out the bones and have left the meat.

nothing too0 sinister here – just a nice choice for the start date of the series shown on the Hadley website.

They are showing the data from 1772 rather than the full series from 1660. Amazingly I couldn’t find a graph of the full series on their website. I have made a version that can be seen at http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5237/cett.jpg

Look at that graph and imagine what year you would start at to give the best impression of AGW?

You can’t trust Manley, as he was funded by big oil: he says “I am indebted to Shell Oil for a personal research grant to cover investigations of our long term records…” That should put the Central England series out-of-bounds for real climate researchers.

More seriously, apart from Manley’s chart finishing in 1973 and being in decadal average temperatures rather than smoothed anomalies (so the dip in the modern chart around 1890 appears around 1895 in the old one) is the difference? You can change how dramatic a chart looks by varying the scales

Alexander Harvey – I started my career in an organization subject to significant regulation, and was advised from day one that you had to assume that anything you ever commit to text in any form would eventually be seen by the people you least wanted to see it, and that you needed to manage yourself accordingly.

“I let my science do the talking, along with all my scientific climate colleagues. It’s up to governments to decide and climate science is just one thing they have to take into account with the decisions they have to make.”

Ahhh… the disinterested scientist, oblivious to the world of petty political issues.

Analysing this, they seemed to have had their gig under pretty good control a few years back. But then there was a thorn, pricking them in the eyeball, where it really hurt, constantly and relentlessly. They started losing focus as result, got sloppy and caved in.

Is it possible to keep a house of cards from collapsing?
I have a feeling a lot of grubby hands are gonna desparately try to do so. But we all know it’s impossible. It’s never been done before. Perhaps I’m writing their epitaph too early – it’s just my gut feeling.

If it indeed comes to this, there’s one man, with the help of a few others, to thank for it.

Here is a link to a very well done chronology of Phil and gang planning to avoid FOI requests from the very first moment they learned the FOI Act would apply to them – – even before anyone had actually made an FOI request.

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t
have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers

OT, but …
I posted comment #61 under Revkin’s Dot earth post “Varying Concerns About Climate Files”
Here it is. It will be interesting to see if they take my suggestion.

Mr Revkin,

It is my understanding Steve McIntyre is referenced more than 400 times in the released CRU emails. You indicate Judith Curry has posted at climateaudit.org and have yourself allowed Mr. McIntyre’s remarks in past head posts you have written.

Given all this, perhaps it is time to post a link to his website in the blogroll in the same section as the link to realclimate.

I have worked for an american company in the UK on safety critical systems.
The email policy (forced on them by US lawyers) was all emails on servers are deleted after 30 days (absolutely no exceptions) All emails are deleted from your mail programme after 30 days (no exception) The only way of keeping old emails was to back up to a local drive (archive)
I assume restoring from monthly backups was also not possible (don’t think I tried this) as this would have negated the policy purpose.

I posted this several hours ago….. “awaiting moderation…?” Is this
RC? …Ez
Today’s WSJ has a brilliant lead editorial about the scandal, hiding data
deleting email, etc. This isn’t going away this time. Mann and Jones appear
to be hiding out in a cave, Mann not using his previous, all-purpose “won’t dignify that question…..”

The Wall Street Journal writies:

“The ‘two MM’s’ are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions – a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service.”

Thank you, M&M! I am so ashamed at what I suspect is the widespread corruption, and intimidation by science thugs.

Stacey: that first graph only goes to 1975, the second to 2009 (maybe you knew that?). The old one is actual temps, the new one temp differences which are by nature more dramatic (that is why they are used, to help see differences).

Not sure if you were going to finish with ‘hockey stick’? As a hockey player, I would have to take that stick back. For really good sticks, you need Sherwood, Titan, or some of the graphs in the IPCC docs. Certainly Central England seems to have been warmer in the last ten years or so though, by about a degree after calibration it seems.

My anger grows daily at the arrogance of Jones, Mann et al. The hoops that this small cadre of individuals went through to deny the reasonable FOIA requests boggle the mind. I have been going through the emails and the code, and what I have been trying to do is construct a chronological ordering of the emails with respect to the FOIA requests. Then I found an excellent article on http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/ written by Willis Eschenbach which accomplishes just this, along with the authors comments. All should read, and point your members of congress to this site.
Mr. McIntyre, did you ever pay the 10 pounds?

After a day or two looking through the code (I’m a programmer, not a climatologist) and getting some good responses from gavin at realClimate I am surprised at a few things.

1) I really thought code like this would be super complicated — obviously simulating weather long term is a very tough problem. However in the code it comes down to, get the measurements, apply arbitrary weighting/changes to the end set of data (blade portion), and then weight in hotter measured temps for the blade only (non linearly). One could argue that the numbers used to reduce proxy signals in the 40’s and amplify them in the blade portion were the result of hundreds of inputs and deep thought, but seeing -.03 and 2.6 there doesn’t inspire confidence. That’s like the ultimate answer being 42. The comments above the lines don’t help either, things like “****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE ******”.

2) Measured temperatures in recent times are way off temps predicted by proxies. Rather than question the proxies, the later measured data is adjusted. Then it is changed again by adding in the latest hotter measured temps — not by overlay, but mixing the signals together plus overlay. You just can’t do this and call it honest. Its made to look like the proxies were hard data this way, but the hard data ends at the foot of the blade. After seeing this in the code, I went to the graphs to check – and the graphs actually also say they are doing this in the notes! So two points for being upfront, but HOW does that get a pass? This isn’t a climate question, this is a statistics/graphing question, and I believe have plenty enough experience in that field to call foul. Then in the ‘IPCC comments file’ you see this brought up in a few places, all rejected (“its in the notes”). Wow. Noting a deception doesn’t make it ok. “Your pants are on fire*” ….. *actually they’re not.

3) In the famous harry file, the v3.0 is being fit to match the 2.1 results. That is fine, but it is by no means independent confirmation of previous data code. Also, the standards are shockingly low in every aspect of that process as well.

My impression is that in the initial stages people are trying hard to do good science, but then the results are filtered at the end to look however they need to look. This happens basically one step before the graph stage, and then again at the graph stage. You can tell a lot from how a graph is presented about bias of intent, but when the bias includes data adjustment as well you basically have to throw the whole thing out.

Anyway, I think I’ve wasted enough time on this. I’m almost glad the financial industry’s code wasn’t made public like this, it is probably similar and I’d have spent a week. 2009 is shaping up to be the year of “the death of the complex computer model”. Except under the covers it isn’t all that complex, just crudely manipulated : (.

wow. Thanks for the link, at first read it seems about the same ‘math’ I’ve been looking at. I guess I’m most confused that this kind of thing has been sort of in the open all along. Maybe people need a good non climate analogy to see what is happening to that data.

I’ve re-run with the same database used for the previous 2006 run (tmp.0705101334.dtb).
[cut]

Is that any better? If not please can you send the traditional multi- page country plots for me to pore over?

Cheers

Harry

On 3 Sep 2009, at 17:04, Tim Osborn wrote:

Hi Harry and Phil,

the mean level of the “updated-to-2008” CRUTS 3.0 now looks good, matching closely with the 1961-1990 means of the earlier CRUTS 3.0 and CRUTS 2.1. Please see the attached PDF of country mean time series, comparing last-year’s CRUTS 3.0 (black, up to 2005) with the most-recent CRUTS 3.0 (pink, up to 2008).

Latest version matches last-year’s version well for the most part, and where differences do occur I can’t say that the new version is any worse than last-year’s version (some may be better).

One exception is the hot JJA in Europe in 2003. This is less extreme in the latest version. See attached PNG for a blow-up of France in JJA. I’m sure some people will use CRU TS 3.0 to look at 2003 in Europe, so we need to be happy with the version we release. Perhaps some hot stations have been dropped as outliers (more than 3 standard deviations from the mean?)?
But I’m not sure if that is the reason, since outlier checking was already used in last-year’s version, wasn’t it? Does the outlier checking always check +-3 SD from 61-90 mean (or
normal), or does it check +-3 SD from the local mean (30-years centred on the value) which would allow for a gradual warming in both mean and outlier threshold?

Cheers

Tim

On Wed, September 2, 2009 6:08 pm, Ian Harris wrote:

Tim

When you have the time and/or the inclination, please can you run the new TMP output through your IDL thingummajig?

Mike Phil Keith Eugene Caspar
What about their AR4 emails would trigger such an incredibly damning note?

Upon rumination, I assume that it would be about their machinations/negotiations about how to squeeze the (Caspar) Ammons/ [Eu](Gene) Wahl 2006/2007 under the AR4 deadline, and what it should say.

This would be the most strongly radioactive waste, that could directly take AR4 down.

So, in this putative scenario, Mike and Phil are calling in the ‘tricky Hail Mary’ play to Briffa, with Mike delivering Gene and Caspar (ringers from his home team.)
The play starts with Phil&Keith’s team short two men, who then rush in from the sidelines to catch the wobbly pass on the 1 yard line and step accross it.

No timeouts remained to check the instant replay cameras to see if they beat the clock, so no protest was possible…

But for Phil’s arrogant genius, we would never have had an openning to revisit the calumny.

This is pure attribution on my part.
Snip at will.
I trust your judgement.
TL

I emailed Phil Jones about two years ago about a difference between HadCRUt and GISS, and he emailed me back. We emailed each other again after that. Yet I have looked for those emails on the published data on the net and they aren’t there, so I would have to think that he most certainly HAS deleted emails!

Here in Australia, the MSM have moved on. The whole issue gained just a little coverage in the right-wing newspapers and our ABC (government-owned) did briefly cover it Monday night – with plenty of time allocated to the AGW supporters to present their side of the issue.

However, today (Wednesday) the ABC is highlighting a new report by “26 scientists” working for the IPCC, that claims ice melt in the Artctic is worse then we thought – sea level rise up 2 metres by 2100, and possible temp rise of 7C. Sound bites from two uni Professors who are key AGW supporters in Australia. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/25/2752579.htm

The point I am making is that although “the system” (Climate science and peer-review, etc) would appear to be substantially broken, the general population in Australia remains totally unaware. And with an El Nino summer ahead of us, you can be sure that every high temp, lack of rain, high winds, tropical cyclone, etc will be “milked” as evidence for catastrophic AGW.

John,
There has been some email traffic in the last few days to a week – quite a bit really, only a small part about MSU. The main part has been one of your House subcommittees wanting Mike Mann and others and IPCC to respond on how they produced their reconstructions and how IPCC produced their report.

In case you want to look at this see later in the email !

Also this load of rubbish !

This is from an Australian at BMRC (not Neville Nicholls). It began from the attached article. What an idiot. The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.

The Australian also alerted me to this blogging ! I think this is the term! Luckily I don’t live in Australia.

Unlike the UK, the public in Australia is very very na�ve about climate change, mostly because of our governments Kyoto stance, and because there is a proliferation of people with no climate knowledge at all that are prepared to do the gov bidding. Hence the general populace is at best confused, and at worst, antagonistic about climate change – for instance, at a recent rural meeting on drought, attended by politicians and around 2000 farmers, a Qld collegue – Dr Roger Stone – spoke about drought from a climatologist point of view, and suggested that climate change may be playing a role in Australias continuing drought+water problem. He was booed and heckled (and unfortunately some politicians applauded when this happened) – that’s what we’re dealing with due to columists such as the one I sent to you.

Another thread for people to look at. in the mails you will find jones coordinating with the IPCC on Ar5…
having chats about them and FOIA. Those conversations need to be out in the open. Who knows what jones suggested.

Rather than piling on, a service could be provided to the community with a discussion about proper disclosure of raw data, codes, adjustments, and documentation related to scientific research. In the biological sciences this is the norm and those who violate the code of science in this regard do not have long and fruitful careers.

Even in fusion research scientific discipline still reigns. Here is a story from nature just this week about a scientist disbarred from government contracts because of what, in relation to what has happened with CRU, seems minor.

There must be consequences to activity that erodes the foundations of the integrity of science. In the end, it is not the politicians that will be blamed for this, it will be the scientists. Al Gore will run for the exits and it will be the scientists involved that will be left wondering what happened, though as one USAF general once told me, this whole thing is like a self licking ice cream cone.

You’d be surprised what can be dredged up out of backups, hell even forensic analysis of a hard disk (generally under court order, or as a last-ditch “oh my God I just deleted three years of work!” recovery exercise) if there’s a need to do so.

How practical it is all depends on (a) what boxes UEA’s mail goes through and where it sits (b) what their system backup policies are (c) whether the backup media for the period involved have been recycled/reused.

And I’m betting that somehow, somewhere, some of the tapes “fell off the truck”.
Computer backups are one of the most unreliable pieces in the whole data management scheme. Ask just about any enterprise datacenter manager what their biggest headache is…and they’ll tell you it’s backups. It’s difficult to do in a business environment…one can only image the lax approach that a university might employ regarding backup completions and retention policies.

But, their lie is that, of course, they did know, quite damn well, that these “scientists” were saying convenient words to their ears, but it was convenient for them to ignore the facts.

Robert

This is exactly my point. There is a vicious circle that develops whereby funding flows to certain pet ideas from a politician (does anyone remember all the money that Gore threw at the U of Michigan for climate software in the 90’s) to a scientist that shares a certain mindset and then it expands from there.

The only solution that I see is a robust and public placement of all raw data, methods, and results after something is published. Internet gadflies with a lot of time on their hands or rival researchers can then do the work necessary to confirm or falsify results.

This is why I hold fellows like Steve M and Anthony W and the others in such high regard. There is no real joy in going through a lot of the things that people have to go through and the stones that are thrown other than the conviction that what they are doing is the right thing to do.

Science is a blood sport, but it must be done without tying the opponents hands before the bout.

While I understand little of it, that the data is a mess is not a nuanced point. Nothing of value appears to be able to be salvaged from it. I especially marveled at the way the program apparently just clatters on without notice or interruption whenever errors are encountered.

I would think it would be wonderfully impressive if CA could present examples of what good clean well-documented and commented data sets look like… how they should perform…. how one embeds “check sums” to catch inadvertent errors, etc.

I suspect this mess of spaghetti code and messy data is going to be the biggest mess for the blowhards to deal with.

In fairness – and it isn’t deserving of much – without knowing where the errors were directed, it’s possible this was a reasonable strategy: make some assumptions about a (possibly largish) dataset; log any exceptions; check for exceptions after each run; correct where necessary; iterate until no exceptions are evident.

I wouldn’t shrink from using that strategy myself where the source data may contain unknown quirks and omissions.

Just a note: Robin Hanson thinks that team behavior is not too unusual in academia. He also considers the emails not much of a deal. He thinks a better solution would be a well constructed prediction market but it would require people their money where their data and analysis is.

Looking at Bob’s chart it looks like they have been fiddling about with the 1940 to 1970s cooling period, the period where the models have to invoke use of aerosols to explain the cooling that was ‘hiding’ the soon to be post 1970s ‘unprecendented’ warming?

This was mentioned in one of the released emails, they one in which Phil Jones is talking to Tome Wigley (1254147614.txt)

“Tom,
A few thoughts
[1]http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0442/preprint/2009/pdf/10.1175_2009JCLI3089.1.pd
f
This is a link to the longer Thompson et al paper. It isn’t yet out in final form – Nov09
maybe?
[2]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/a-look-at-the-thompson-et-al-paper-hi-tech-wiggle
-matching-and-removal-of-natural-variables/
is a link to wattsupwiththat – not looked through this apart from a quick scan. Dave
Thompson just emailed me this over the weekend and said someone had been busy! They seemed
to have not fully understood what was done.
Have looked at the plots. I’m told that the HadSST3 paper is fairly near to being
submitted, but I’ve still yet to see a copy. More SST data have been added for the WW2 and
WW1 periods, but according to John Kennedy they have not made much difference to these
periods.
Here’s the two ppts I think I showed in Boulder in June. These were from April 09, so
don’t know what these would look like now. SH is on the left and adjustment there seems
larger, for some reason – probably just British ships there?
Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, but the adjustments won’t reduce the 1940s
blip but enhance it. It won’t change the 1940-44 period, just raise the 10 years after Aug
45.
I expect MOHC are looking at the NH minus SH series re the aerosols. My view is that a
cooler temps later in the 1950s and 1960s it is easier to explain.
Land warming in the 1940s and late 1930s is mainly high latitude in NH.
One other thing – MOHC are also revising the 1961-90 normals. This will likely have more
effect in the SH.
With the SH around 1910s there is the issue of exposure problems in Australia – see
Neville’s paper.
This shouldn’t be an issue in NZ – except maybe before 1880, but could be in southern
South America. New work in Spain suggest screens got renewed about 1900, so maybe this
happened in Chile and Argentina, but Mossmann was head of the Argentine NMS so he may have
got them to use Stevenson screens early.
Neville has never been successful getting any OZ funding to sort out pre-1910 temps
everywhere except Qld.
Here’s a paper in CC on European exposure problems. There is also one on Spanish series.
Cheers
Phil
At 06:25 28/09/2009, Tom Wigley wrote:

Phil,
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly
explain the 1940s warming blip.
If you look at the attached plot you will see that the
land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know).
So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC,
then this would be significant for the global mean — but
we’d still have to explain the land blip.
I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an
ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of
ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common
forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of
these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are
1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity
plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things
consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
Removing ENSO does not affect this.
It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip,
but we are still left with “why the blip”.
Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol
effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced
ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling
in the NH — just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols.
The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note — from
MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can
get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal
solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987
(and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s
makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it
currently is not) — but not really enough.
So … why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem?
(SH/NH data also attached.)
This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I’d
appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have.
Tom.

Hey Steve Mcintyre. I once asked you in a blog post if not they fabricated
some of the data presented as a proof of global warming. You then criticized me for “going a bridge too far”. Now I feel vindicated in my suspicion. Nevertheless, you thereby taught me to tread carefully and to be patient.I thank you for that. It pays off. Now I can congratulate you. I find you are doing a marvelous job uncovering the mess the climate science is in, and you certainly deserves to be nominated the best science blog this year. Being mentioned at least 400 times in the leaked e-mails shows the enormous impact your work has done.

Looking at the background of these people at CRU: does anyone know detail of Briffas academic background ? His bio is silent on original education other than has been at UEA since late seventies. His boss looks a bit thin as well: undergrad degree from Lancaster in “environmental sciences” in the seventies followed by PhD at Newcastle on “descriptive” subject. Are these really top flight scientists? They sound a bit ordinary to me. Just looking at their e-mail exchanges they appear very ordinary.

The amusing (if it weren’t so serious) thing is that the major focus of current concern is nothing to do with “climate science” ( which can never aspire to the levels of precision needed to establish a causal link between CO2 and warming trends (if they exist)). The issues are undergraduate engineering levels of competence required in treatment of data and creation/management of data bases.

So much trouble has been caused by the attempts to merge proxy historical data with more current measurements using arithmetic/statistical techniques which are opaque to an inquiring world. Why not just leave the series separate and allow the world to decide whether it tells a compelling story?

I think, bit by bit, these guys got sucked into something that became too big to handle and too big to exit from without career/life threatening consequences. You occasionally see the same thing happening in business and it always ends in tears!

Willis’ excellent retelling of his experiences with FOI requests raises two important points: First, persistence will be crucial. In the light of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor’s statement signalling the circling of the wagons, this is going to be a long drawn out affair and things will only improve if the current incredible effort is maintained.

Second, precision and relevance are also crucial. At RC, there are many statements charging a grand AGW conspiracy or that there is no warming or that no data has been released. These claims are not helpful as they are easily dismissed and support the charge that skeptics are crazy denialists. The power of Willis’ and Steve’s comments and FOI requests is that they are both precise and substantive. It is clear that Phil and others understand the importance of the requests even if they dramatically misinterpret the motivations.

Bob Watson says that the reason why they can’t release the global temperature data is because it belongs to other countries. We’ve heard that before. Has anyone come across an email from Phil Jones or any other person, asking other countries if they minded if he released the raw data? Surely it was important? There must be begging letter, after begging letter? No?

“Lauren Morello’s report in the NYT yesterday was a classic in the annals of warmist propaganda. She only quoted one skeptic, and gave those whose behavior in this episode appears to be criminal free reign to whitewash their deeds. The supreme irony inherent in the comment by Michael Mann, whose crimes against open science are well-documented in these emails and elsewhere (ClimateAudit.org), is ignored.

“If the NYT won’t publish the content of the actual emails, how is the casual reader to understand the gravity of what has been going on in the bowels of climate science in the past decade?”

Hello,
I’m a long-time lurker and a first-time poster. I’ve been appalled by the recent email scandal and hope it doesn’t simply blow away. The group on here has provided a hugely valuable service, and I offer my profound thanks.

On the other hand, there are those who will never be convinced as this humorous post on Realclimate illustrates:

Mark, wishful thinking is an incredibly powerful force.

Gavin, I’m amazed at your endurance — get some sleep, dude! Well done with the responses, and hang in there. I suspect this whole thing is going to backfire… of course, that could just be wishful thinking on my part. 😉

The important thing to remember in the response to this is to try to keep everyone’s eye on the ball. The laws of physics are not going to change because somebody hacked somebody’s email. That this is even being discussed just goes to show that “reality is what you can get away with.” — RAW

Gavin, I’m going to pass on some words of encouragement that a very wise person once gave me in trying times. They may seem a bit odd, but perhaps you will find some use in them. It is worth remembering that, given the circumstances, scientists studying climate at this juncture are likely among the most important humans extant. You will be held to a higher standard, and maybe that’s OK, because when the stakes are this high, you can’t make a lot of mistakes. Keep in mind that you are genuinely, without hyperbole, here to save the world.

Anyway, some words of wisdom from an old friend:

“You are a Jah Warrior, a Light Messenger. You are here to spread love and light in the world. You need to remember who you are and why you are here!”

There is an anomaly in the date/timestamp on every email i have checked so far to and from Phil Jones. Could be nothing, could be a bombshell.

The uea.ac.uk mail server is located in Bristol, England (verified by a who.is search) which is smack dab in the middle of Greenwich Mean Time. Ground zero. Yet, the date/timestamp on every email (p.jones@uea.ac.uk) shows GMT minus 4 hours, which is the timezone for the eastern US. I verified this by converting the .txt file name from unix epoch to conventional date/time.

How is this possible? Did the uea.ac.uk tech guy forget to set the internal clock on the mail server? not likely. Were the FOIA email files compiled on a server in the US then uploaded to the Russian server? Was the whisleblower located in the United States??

A lot of questions here…

This is not my area of expertise. Perhaps there are readers here who Know about IT forensic examinations…

Wonder if the CRU network administrator is competent?
If he is, then there should be backup tapes and disks of the entire CRU network with all the emails that were deleted. Question is will the UEA folks stonewall to protect one of their own or will the bus run over the herr Dr Professor?

Ebell: Not hacking–was a whistle-blower who was fed up; although not culpable in these emails, K.T. is part of the gang that is; cooking the data; they’ve shown no honor, now they have no sense of shame; won’t admit the data is fudged; so shameful.

Scott: reads Santer’s email threatening violence:

Trenborth: Santer’s email doesn’t compromise the data; the doubts found in emails have been openly expressed previously; etc; consensus still stands.
——————————————————————

Trenborth is a sharp, good-looking guy. Did a good job defending his personal position, which of course, is not nearly as jeopardized as the others, i.e. Mann and Jones and Santer. They are lucky to have him out there blunting the attack. Ebell is an attack dog, and was also persuasive in discrediting climate science as a corrupt movement.

Roger Pielke senior points out another falsehood in Jones’s statement. Unfortunately Roger hasn’t quite read what Jones wrote correctly, but it’s still a falsehood (Jones said the groups were completely independent, Roger interpreted it as saying the temperature series were independent).

You’ve got to feel almost sorry for Elizabeth May and George Monbiot. The leader of the Green Party and the prominent columnist and promoter of catastrophic climate change from Britain’s Guardian are due, next Tuesday, to debate Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg and former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson in Toronto on climate change. In the latest Munk Debate, Messrs May and Monbiot will support the motion “Be it resolved climate change is mankind’s defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response.”

They have to take the stage in the wake of the devastating hack/leak from Britain’s Climate Research Unit of the Hadley Centre at the University of East Anglia, which indicates extensive scientific chicanery to support the warmist cause.

Looks like they (CRU) won’t have to worry about deleting or removing content in future emails. At this time emails sent to cru@uea.ac.uk and other contact staff emails listed on the CRU Staff page are being rejected. – The CRU page is also listed as being served by an emergency webserver! I wonder what the emergency is?
—http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/

There seem to be some criticism of Manns graphs on the internet. One of the most prominent is his proxy-based temperature reconstruction. Criticism has been particularily directed at his lack of proper uncertainty/error-bar, as can be seen in the following link:

This is just plain wrong, as I happened to come over the REAL image on the internet. As you can see with a larger view you can easily make out the white uncertainty/error-bar against the light blue background:

Mike,
In an odd way this is cheering news ! One other thing about the CC paper – just found
another email – is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals
to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.

Cheers
Phil

“It is with deep sadness that the Daly Family have to announce the sudden death of John
Daly.Condolences may be sent to John’s email account (daly@john-daly.com)
”
Reported with great sadness

I was somewhat amazed to find this rather frank admission in an emalil from Cook to Briffa on Wednesday, 3 September 2003 07:32:11 : Filename: 1062592331.txt

Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I
almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will
show that we can probably say a fair bit about 100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know
with certainty that we know f-all).

Of course, none of what I have proposed has addressed the issue of
seasonality of response. So what I am suggesting is strictly an
empirical comparison of published 1000 year NH reconstructions
because many of the same tree-ring proxies get used in both seasonal
and annual recons anyway. So all I care about is how the recons
differ and where they differ most in frequency and time without any
direct consideration of their TRUE association with observed
temperatures.

The e-mail relelease finally made in into CNN’s US evening newscast this evening (just a couple of minutes ago) . The explanations of the emails and related events offered by the journalists was absolutely atrocious.

They tried to relate it to the upcoming Compenhagen meetings, but at least they didn’t try to justify that this didn’t affect the undeniability of AGW. They did show the results of polls that belief in AGW was slipping (mainly among Republicans?). A clip of Al Gore in a sitcom (somewhat parodying himself) and Imhofe decrying AGW alarmism was also included.

It seems (to me) to be a new low in politics to have a “congressional report” generated specifically to question unquestioned science.

Reply,

Your last comment seems to reflect a belief that it is scurrilous to
“question unquestioned science”. Wouldn’t there seem to be a long
honored history of exactly this type of action, both before and after
Einstein? Or perhaps I’m misinterpreting your remarks.

The real issue with the trick is that UEA considers the early data (pre 1850) to be an accurate proxy for temperature in the first place. If you look at the blade of the stick, the total warming is about .6 to .8C. This is consistent with what everyone agrees is the warming since c.1850. No surprise, since they used the actual temperature record to create the stick after that date. The real inaccuracy of the stick is the idea that proxy data that is demonstrably wrong after 1850 is somehow right before 1850. This is borne out by Steve M’s work that shows an R squared of .02 for the tree ring data.

That is a terrific article from Willis Eschenbach. It deserves maximum exposure. In my humble opinion it is the most important and most telling piece written on this scandal so far. It would be nice to have it as a guest blog here on CA, as surely many mainstream journos are now following CA, but may not venture onto the less read blogs.

By the way why is Susan Solomon a recipient in many of the confidential emails in which they plot their FOI refusal plans? She is a very influential figure in IPCC. What is her role in all this?

What kind of technological illiterate imagines that anything he can do from his keyboard will delete email – from the local mailserver, the ISP, any of the, say 100, machines that forwarded the mail? I pass by without mention NSA and RSE.

I don’t think it’s possible that the files were re-stamped when they were uploaded to the Russian proxy server. It’s already been established that the server was located in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia which is GMT +3. So we have a bit of a mystery here.

A British reporter is now claiming he had the emails a month ago. If that’s true, it would be revealing to know what those filenames are.

Mr. McIntyre- The May 29, 2008 exchange between Mann and Jones (where Jones asks for e-mail deletion) indicates their opinion that if you actually discovered “the 1945 problem” it would be WSJ worthy. That may be sarcasm, but it strikes me as a rather frank admission that the 1945 problem is a “news problem” not just a “science problem.” Apologies if this has been covered.

And if I might, I would leave this post at the top of this site and recommend that everyone forward the link to their local media outlet. The facial contradiction is begging for investigation. Frankly, it’s journalistic malpractice to see the juxtaposition and not follow-up on it.

After Steve’s original request for the original data behind the CRU temperature series was turned down it was revealed that it had been “lost” and only the “value added” data remained. Given the machinations revealed by the emails could it be that the CRU realised that releasing this data would demonstrate what Harry’s log appears to suggest, that the numbers had been massaged to give an appearance of global warming, and that far from being lost the data had been destroyed to remove any evidence. Since Harry appears to have been working from 2006 to 2009 and to have had access to at least some original data it may be that the data had not been “lost” just “mislaid”.

Crowley: Would that be the same Crowley who wrote this in letters, Guardian, 26 Nov 2009? :-

“• Since climate sceptics seem in no way bothered by the legality or morality of hacking into someone’s personal email, does that mean it is alright to hack into the sceptics’ sites? Might there even be legal justification, under freedom of information acts, to check for evidence for collusion or illegal activities of those “opposing global warming”? It would be highly revealing to read what climate “sceptic” sites contained. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander …

Thomas Crowley

University of Edinburgh”

I sent this to the letters page (unlikely to be printed):

“In concentrating on the supposed illegality or immorality of the
acquisition of the emails and data from the University of East Anglia
Climate Research Unit, Thomas Crowley (letters, 26th November 2009) is
in danger of shooting the messenger and ignoring the message.

As far as I know there is so far no proof that this was a hack from the
outside and several reasons to suppose it might have been a leak from
the inside, for example from someone who disapproved of the attempt by
certain individuals to flout requests made under the Freedom of
Information Act.

Most cases of leaking raise questions of ethics on the part of leaker(s)
and recipient(s). Given the nature of what has now been revealed, it
seems clear to me that the benefit to public knowledge and scrutiny that
has resulted far outweighs any questions about the morality of the means
of obtaining the information. Disclosure should be the norm in any
self-respecting scientific research, especially that which potentially
may affect the lives of us all.”

OK, at some point, the Had Crew will be required to produce the original data, when this comes to court. And it will.

Their only defense is that the dog ate the data. Otherwise the Had Crew have erased the original data. This is the only possible explanation if they do not produce it. Forget thee-mails, secondary; look at the S/W code: a disgrace.

But, also, bear in mind one more point. When one is accused of fraud, or cheating, or lying, in the UK, you can always resort to slander and liberl laws. The fact that these lying, fraudulent crimatologists haven’t done this is an admittal of their guilt.

At last the mouthpiece of the British government, that once venerable institution the BBC, grows some stones and speaks candidly on ClimateGate in a well-considered article on their website….http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8388485.stm

Mike Hulme and Jerome Ravetz ( famous for the quote:”Wherever there’s a system, there’s a racket to beat it.”) have been granted a momentous public platform to plead the case for reform of the scientific process. In a clear acknowledgement to the invaluable public service that the blogosphere ( most obviously Climate Audit and Wattsupwiththat) the very thoughtful and wordy piece knocks into a cocked hat all the usual drivel written by most ‘environment correspondents’ from the mainstream media.

At last there appears a chink of light to guide the public out of the murk created by the IPCC and vested political lobbyists.